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October 18, 2010

The Leopard _ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Not being a great fan of historical novels and lacking any in-depth knowledge of 19th century European (specifically Italian) politics, I approached The Leopardwith modest expectations. The book was a present from my daughter who had urged me to read it and when I showed little enthusiasm, she gave it to me as a birthday gift a few years ago. I got around to reading it only recently and found myself irresistibly wrapped up in a 150 year old tale of baroque Italian politics - the delicate balance of class hierarchy, tensions between progressives and traditionalists and above all, the life story of an aristocratic man who viewed history, power, human relations and the inevitability of death with an almost telescopic distance and detachment.

The Leopard, written by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa was published a year after the author’s death in 1957. Based on the life of his great-grandfather, the benevolent Sicilian tyrant Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, Lampedusa’s account is meticulous in attention, generous in admiration and tinged with half hearted regret for the loss of a certain way of life. I say half-hearted because it is not entirely clear whether the author, the penurious descendant of a once prosperous and proud feudal family, gently mocks his ancestor’s grandiose ways while harboring considerable affection for the man himself.

The title character, Don Fabrizio aka The Leopard (a nickname derived from the family’s coat of arms) is a fascinating character. Large and proud, possessing big appetites and enormous physical strength, the Prince was elegant, generous, occasionally unthinkingly cruel and often unexpectedly melancholy. He supported the brood of offspring he had spawned with his long suffering wife as well as a large retinue of servants and dependants. But he was not above casting a jaundiced eye on their minor shortcomings. His wife's hysterical sorrow exasperated him; his sons disappointed him; his daughters' emotional upheavals irritated him. Outwardly reverential toward the ever present Jesuit clergy (the Jesuit intially opposed the Italian revolution for unification that is the backdrop of the novel), he rarely missed an opportunity to mock the resident priest Father Pirrone for his piety and poor personal hygiene. In fact the only character in the novel toward whom the Prince was unfailingly affectionate and forgiving was his charming and ambitious nephew Tancredi Falconeri, a penniless aristocratic young man who fought on the side of Garibaldi’s Red Shirts who brought the battle for the Risorgimento to the Sicilian shores in 1860.

The novel, after its posthumous publication, became an instant sensation. It was embraced and assailed by both the left and the right of the Italian political divide. Many conservatives felt that Lampedusa had betrayed his own noble heritage by mocking the upper class while some progressives with socialist leanings interpreted his views as a repudiation of the Italian unification. Many prominent leftist Italian writers criticized him for telling a “straight” old fashioned story that was not edgy and did not make an unambiguous socialist statement - Lampedusa was not avant garde enough for their taste. But that it was a literary triumph was recognized by many others in Italy and abroad. When the French writer Louis Aragon, a leading Marxist intellectual, called The Leopard “the greatest novel of all time” that owed nothing to Joyce or Proust and was also left wing in its sympathies, the criticism at home subsided. Later the English author E.M. Forster called it a 'noble book,' that was not so much a historical novel but a 'novel which happens to take place in history.'

I myself did not see any overt evidence of Marxist leanings expressed in the novel although there is no doubt that Lampedusa, the author, was on the side of justice and fair play. But on whose side was the Prince, the novel's protagonist? Don Fabrizio took great satisfaction in his personal wealth and influence but still had a finely tuned ear for the nuances in the skittish voices of poor peasants and the unctuous and gauche etiquette of the newly rich aspiring aristocrats, climbing their way out of the working class. He despised his own cautious and traditionalist son and adored the cocky, populist nephew who fought on the side of the rebels. Unlike Alberto Moravia, many others among the Italian intelligentsia with communist /socialist sympathies saw The Leopard as a tribute to the common man – the peasants and laborers who were freed of their feudal yoke by Garibaldi’s uprising. The novel’s emphasis on the rigid class structure of the under-developed and poverty ridden 19th century Sicily impressed the left and many became admirers. Lampedusa’s account of the Risorgimento convinced Marxist director Luchino Visconti to turn it into a film. The political left’s fascination with the novel notwithstanding, the reader can not be entirely sure if Don Fabrizio saw the unification of Italy as a desirable outcome for Sicily or a disaster for his own family and cohorts. Whether he applauded the displacement of the aristocracy, making way for a more egalitarian society, is not a message that is loudly telegraphed. Was the Prince’s casual reference to the political theory espoused by "some German Jew whose name I can't remember,” enough for the leftists to claim him as their own? It is a rather slender hook on which to hang the hat of solidarity because what the Prince actually said about feudalism, social revolutions and Sicily, is more intriguing than any simple statement of left or right philosophy. For example, when an envoy of the new government travels to the Prince’s palace with the offer of a senate seat, The Leopard refuses and instead responds with the following impassioned outburst.

'You're a gentleman, Chevalley, and I consider it a privilege to have met you; you are right in all you say; your only mistake was saying "the Sicilians must want to improve." I'll tell you a personal anecdote. Two or three days before Garibaldi entered Palermo I was introduced to some British naval officers from one of the warships then in harbour to keep an eye on things. They had heard, I don't know how, that I own a house down on the shore facing the sea, with a terrace on its roof from which can be seen the whole circle of hills around the city; they asked to visit this house of mine and look at the landscape where Garibaldini were said to be operating, as they could get no clear idea from their ships. In fact Garibaldi was already at Gibilrossa. They came to my house, I accompanied them up on to the roof; they were simple youths in spite of their reddish whiskers. They were ecstatic about the view, the vehemence of the light; they confessed, though, that they had been horrified at the squalor, decay, filth of the streets around. I didn't explain to them that one thing was derived from the other, as I have tried to with you. Then one of them asked me what those Italian volunteers were really coming to do in Sicily. "They are coming to teach us good manners!" I replied in English. "But they won't succeed, because we are gods."

'I don't think they understood, but they laughed and went off.That is my answer to you too, my dear Chevalley; the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion by outsiders, whether so by origin or, if Sicilian, by independence of spirit, upsets their illusion of achieved perfection, risks disturbing their satisfied waiting for nothing; having been trampled on by a dozen different peoples, they think they have an imperial past which gives them a right to a grand funeral.

'Do you really think, Chevalley, that you are the first who has hoped to canalise Sicily into the flow of universal history? I wonder how many Moslem Imams, how many of King Roger’s knights, how many Swabian scribes, how many Angevin barons, how many jurists of the Most Catholic King have conceived the same fine folly; and how many Spanish viceroys too, how many of Charles III’s reforming functionaries! And who knows now what happened to them all! Sicily wanted to sleep in spite of their invocations; for why should she listen to them if she herself is rich, if she’s wise, if she’s civilized, if she’s honest, if she’s admired and envied by all, if, in a word, she is perfect?

It is not much of a stretch to speculate that the Prince was speaking as much about himself as of his beloved Sicily, its languor and inertia. Bone-wary of the rapidly shifting allegiances and reorganization of the power structure in high places, the Prince found in one of his subjects’ spontaneous views of the emerging new order, a more interesting foreshadowing of things to come.

At the end of the evening of the plebiscite the mayor of Donnafugata, the summer home of the Prince, had announced 512 votes for reunification and zero against, making the result unanimous in support of the proposition. During a hunting trip later in the week, Don Fabrizio asked the church organist and his plebian hunting buddy, Ciccio Tumeo, if he had voted yes or no for the Risorgimento. The organist, a poor man whose livelihood depended largely on his employer’s kindness, first replied sullenly that the Prince surely knew from the official result that “everyone” had voted “yes.” But after a while, lulled by the cool mountain air and the Prince’s patient but quizzical demeanor, Don Ciccio suddenly thundered that he had actually voted "against" the dismantling of the old system and the Prince understood without much surprise why the arduous effort of democratization had already failed the common man.

'I, Excellency, voted "no". "No", a hundred times "no". I know what you told me: necessity, unity, expediency. You may be right; I know nothing of politics. Such things I leave to others. But Ciccio Tumeo is honest, poor though he may be, with his trousers in holes' (and he slapped the carefully mended patches on the buttocks of his shooting breeches) 'and I don't forget favours done me! Those swines in the Town Hall just swallowed up my opinion, chewed it and then spat it out transformed as they wanted. I said black and they made me say white. The one time when I could say what I thought that bloodsucker Sedara went and annulled it, behaved as if I'd never existed, as If I never meant a thing, me, Francesco Tumeo La Manna son of the late Leonardo, organist of the Mother Church at Donnafugata, a better man than he is! To think I'd even dedicated to him a mazurka composed by me at the birth of that...' (he bit a finger to rein himself in) 'that mincing daughter of his!'

At this point calm descended on Don Fabrizio, who had finally solved the enigma; now he knew who had been killed at Donnafugata, at a hundred other places, in the course of that night of dirty wind: a new-born babe: good faith; just the very child who should have been cared for most, whose strengthening would have justified all the silly vandalisms. Don Ciccio's negative vote, fifty similar votes at Donnafugata, a hundred thousand 'no's' in the whole Kingdom, would have had no effect on the result, have made it, in fact, if anything more significant; and this maiming of souls would have been avoided. Six months before they used to hear a rough despotic voice saying: 'Do what I say or you're for it!' Now there was already an impression of such a threat being replaced by a money-lender's soapy tones: 'But you signed it yourself, didn't you? Can't you see? It's quite clear. You must do as we say, for here are the IOU's; your will is identical with mine.'

Given Italy’s rich and varied political history, it is tempting to compare The Leopard with Machiavelli’s Prince and Don Fabrizio with the Godfather of popular culture. But the book and its main character lack the theatrics and brutality of either. Don Fabrizio, above all, comes across as an introspective man, a man who would rather scrutinize the laws governing the constellations in the night sky (he was an avid and able amateur astronomer) than analyze the motives of earthly governments which he preferred to merely observe with admiration or contempt as the situation deserved, while letting history take its own course. When the old order crumbled before his eyes, the Prince turned to contemplating the stars and his own death which increasingly came to look like an escape hatch from the tedium of politics and familial and social obligations.

The book begins in the year 1860 and deals mostly with the frantic pace of the revolutionary years up to 1862. Then it makes an abrupt leap to 1883, when the Prince and the other characters are older and the former is on the verge of death. The book wraps up with a final chapter in 1910, describing the declining years of the Prince’s three spinster daughters who continued to live out their lives in the ancestral palace, by then, a decrepit shadow of its former opulent glory when their father ruled the roost.

The Leopard, by some accounts was an unfinished work. But it doesn’t have the jarring feel of one although the last chapters are sweepingly brief. In fact, it is one of the most astute, definitive and artistically crafted political novels I have read. Lampedusa’s extraordinary prose captures the beauty and harshness of the Sicilian landscape as expressively as it does the character of those who inhabit it. The Prince of Salina looms larger than life throughout the novel. Yet we know that far greater forces were at work in the background (Garibaldi never appears in person; his presence is mentioned only through anecdotes) which would change not just the Prince’s fate but also forever that of his family, close friends and the island of Sicily. By the end of the story, everyone had come to terms with the “revolution” including the Catholic Church. Erstwhile revolutionaries had become members of the establishment, their Red Shirt days only a memory; improved roads and newly laid railway lines connected the once forlorn southern island to the rest of Italy; the old feudal aristocracy had given way to new land owners who hid their modest roots by inventing a count or a prince in the family tree. The elements still battered Sicily’s mountains and surrounding seas. Farmers and fishermen continued to do what they had done for centuries. In other words, flamboyant revolutions can change the power structure, cause death, destruction and widespread euphoria or paranoia, but as forces of stable social transformation, they are overrated. Lasting peace and progress mostly require sweating the small stuff.

The Leopard is a wonderful book and at just over 200 pages, it won't take up much of your time - do read.

[A note about the translation: I don't know if The Leopard has more than one English translation. My copy was translated by Archibald Colquhoun, with an excellent introduction by David Gilmour. Not having read the original Italian (Il Gattopardo), I am ill equipped to comment on how true to Lampedusa’s work the translation is. However, Colquhoun’s superb literary effort makes it an excellent read in English. Although the narrative is set in the latter half of the 19thcentury, Lampedusa made several references to mid 20th century technology and politics in the form of futuristic commentary, enabled by 20/20 hindsight. This permits the story to be told in a formal, yet contemporary voice.]

Comments

This was made into a movie, starring American Burt Lancaster and released in 1963. You can find "The Leopard" (English version) on NetFlix.

"In this war drama set in 1860s Sicily, Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (Burt Lancaster) attempts to hold onto the glory he once knew, while his nephew, Tancredi Falconeri (Alain Delon), has joined opposition forces and is being heralded as a war hero. As Falconeri begins to fall for Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), the daughter of the town's new mayor, Don Calogero Sedara (Paolo Stoppa), Salina must learn to accept his changing political status."

Loved the book, loved the movie, love the review! Thank you! I don't read literary Italian well enough to have tackled it in that language. People who know say it's very hard to read, an intense pleasure if your Italian is up to it. Ten years ago, I read it aloud for a few hours to the late Ruth Feldman, an acclaimed translator of contemporary Italian poetry. Her vision was then failing. She said if I had been a perfect reader aloud -- which I am not, even in English -- it would have been very difficult to understand everything. I was too busy trying to pronounce to know. I'm sticking with Colqhoun.

My recall of youthful readings is that the intense ambivalence of Don Fabrizio, and his nihilism, made a thrilling rendering of a Sicilian aristocrat. For a feeling of Sicily, you can't beat this book -- it will come off on your hands. No one can get near it for that. The left can't really claim it, but in the 60s, the left was busier claiming things than now. Lampedusa lived very quietly, avowed almost no politics, studied Shakespeare most of his life. He was married to a Baltic baroness, one of Italy's first psychoanalysts, certainly one of the first women there to be a psychoanalyst. Luigi Barzini, a beloved Italian journalist, interviewed the princess soon after Lampedusa died; she gave him iced coffee with a parcel of cream solidified in paper. A regal and cryptic eccentric. His nephew by adoption has renovated the family palazzo in Palermo. He's a communist, his wife is a Green. They spent a lot on striped upholstery. AB readers interested in current Lampedusiana might read an article of more than 15 years ago in the New Yorker archive, by Fernanda Eberstadt. There's a pretty good bio, _The Last Leopard_, by David Gilmour. It'll put the whole family in context -- oy! About Giuseppe Tommasi, the Prince of Lampedusa, there is much to speculate but little to know, unless you read _The Leopard_. And a story called "The Mermaid" -- enchanting and deep and sexy and sad.

Thanks for the illuminating info, Elatia. I came to this book late in life at the urging of my daughter, as noted. I now plan to see the movie also. I did not know about the film when I was reading the book and somehow did not envision Burt Lancaster as a likely "Leopard." But Lancaster was such a fine actor, I am sure he captured the essence of the man.

As I mention in the review, the novel may not have been the finished product. There are some allusions to future events, particularly involving Tancredi and his luscious wife Angelica that Lampedusa never comes back to elaborate and I thought he would. Do you think that if he'd had the good health and time to expand the story further fleshing out more of the details, we might have caught a glimpse of the perennially invisible peasant mother of Angelica, the wife of the mayor of Donnafugatta?

Ruchira, I am thinking of the reference to Tancredi's marriage to Angelica, amid describing the events in the chapter, "Love at Donnafugata," the authorial voice remarked their future marriage was "not a success, not even sexually." Also, somewhere, a wacky reference to Sigmund Freud and airplanes, if I recall. While marveling at the novel, allowing it to touch me deeply, I lost some patience with it too, until the final chapter, the last image, the deep pathos of it. If I had written anything like that, I would have been frightened to "go back in," as the surgeons say. It would have been enough. God knows what would have happened, had the Prince of Lampedusa had more time to revise.

No, not beyond what I can make out from my background in French. But, assuming that Archibald Colquhoun has not changed the overall phrasing too much from the original, the sense of Italian in translation should come through fairly well, I think.
My French helps me read in the original - I was tackling Marcel Pagnol's Souvenirs d'Enfance the other day. It did strike me that while translations might be available, I would have enjoyed those less than the original, even as I occasionally sat puzzling out the meaning of a word here and there.
As for the flavor of the language coming through, I might have pointed to 'The God of Small Things',except that it is written originally in English. To my mind, I have no doubt that a good portion of it was written while Roy was thinking in Malayalam and twisting her English prose to fit.

This isn't a book I could read these days because it clearly needs dedication, but I will comment on the movie. I saw the English version in India in the 60s and loved it. What was not to love with that deadly combination of art-film, Burt & Alain, and phoren? My tastes have changed over the years, I have grown more critical and impatient, and art no longer impresses of itself.

I saw the Italian version, Il Gattopardo, last year and gave it a one star rating - for "hated it". Without having to watch it again I can't remember why I was so down on the film - just that I found myself yawning at all the prettiness of it, triggered by the extended ballroom scene. For me it added up to why should I care for these people, a pattern I see in most of the director's films. It's a pity that it was made at a time when ALL Italian movies were dubbed (equally in Italian and English), and generally self-indulgent in execution and editing. Lancaster didn't bother to mouth the dialogue in Italian, and I can't recall if Delon did. Now that I am attuned to the sounds of several languages I want to see lips-don't-lie in films, without which the emotional experience is lacking for me.

Too bad too that Visconti got hold of the property; his films may have had useful shock value in his days but now seem merely perverse. Bertolucci, the Tavianis, or Tornatore would have given us a more enduring rendition of the book; their films are memorable for sympathetic portrayals of families in transition, and of characters in the throes of social change and political upheaval, or simply, nostalgia. And surely there were charismatic Italian actors (I'm thinking De Sica, Mastroianni, Gassman) who might have been more convincing than the outsiders Lancaster & Delon, much as I like them in movies in their own vernaculars. Be thankful he didn't pick Dirk Bogarde and Helmut Griem!

Narayan, "The Leopard" wasn't a typical Sicilian in his physical attributes. He was half German (his mother), blue eyed and Teutonic in stature. So a non-Italian actor with non-Latin looks is the right pick to portray him. I just hadn't envisioned Burt Lancaster. As for Alain Delon, I can see him playing Tancredi without a problem.

It's not the appearance that bothered me but their inability to voice or lip-synch Italian. Wouldn't Vittorio Gassman have fit your Teutonic bill? You may recall him from War & Peace. Check him out, in his seventies, reading a menu, the list of ingredients on a food package, a lab test report - it's fun.
What is your idea of Teutonic stature and looks then, as opposed to Italian or Sicilian? Despite the fact that Germanic people have been in Italy for more than two millennium, and that for a millennium it was Germans who controlled the Holy Roman Empire, I think we cling to clear distinctions of physiognomy and regional characteristics. Lampedusa too, if you were quoting him.

Vittorio Gassman would have made a good Leopard, in my opinion, perhaps a bit slender. I have no set opinion of Sicilian physiognomy. I was indeed quoting Lampedusa - the description is his. And he may have worked from an actual account of his ancestor's physical appearance (paintings, photographs) and not any stereotypes of regional charactristics. Remember that the character is based on a real person, not a product of the author's imagination.

If you liked The Leopard and haven't read Stendhal, do so. Lampedusa's style owes a great deal to his French master. Before The Leopard, the greatest novel about 19th-century Italy was The Charterhouse of Parma.

Anderson, What about Manzoni -- I Promessi Sposi? To my reading, the Charterhouse of Parma was a very French novel set in an imaginary court in Italy, written by a Frenchman who spent more time in Italy than in France. No accident the main character of each was called Fabrizio.

Narayan, Burt Lancaster was an Italophile, spent his last coupla decades in Rome. Better casting could not have been achieved, if you do like the novel. But I'm into Burt... It may be worth noting that Sicily is as full of blondes without signature Southern Mediterranean looks as Milan. It was for centuries a stronghold of the Normans, the Angevins, the Hohenstaufens and the Spanish Bourbons. The largest and the most fruitful Mediterranean island, it was plunder consummate, and the present population shows it. Gassman was aristocratic looking, and a wonderful actor. But the Prince of Salina has virility collapsing to nihilism, Burt's kind of vibe when he had to act really, rather than walk on. I like subtitles best too, btw.

Ruchira, I read it and reread it when I was a kid. That kind of reading stays. But give it time...

Sujatha, I'd love to spot Mayalayam thoughts like that -- very exciting. MORE on how you arrive at that sometime, please!

The translation of the original Italian was a rushed job: hurried into print because of the sensation caused by the original. The translator, Archibald Colquhoun, has a good grasp of Italian but no grasp of Sicilian. I first read the novel in translation some 35 years ago and was put off by, not the story but the translation. It did not read like good English prose and the style was "foreign". When I finally got around to reading the original 10 years ago and re-reading it 5 years ago, I decided to translate it on my own, the memory of my first reaction to the English version still vivid in my mind. The task took over a year to accomplish.

The existing translation by AC slavishly follows the syntax of the Italian original: a concatenation of subordinate clauses. There are few if any mistranslations but a few misunderstandings of the original language, and an obvious lack of knowledge of Sicily and its language (Sicilian phrases appear rarely but names appear often.

The point of my translation was to reproduce the novel in good English prose (to make it seems like an original). This does not mean, produce a "version" of the novel but rather to produce a correct English equivalent. Gone are the endless subordinate clauses, rendered more palatable and understandable in separate sentences. Confusions about the original meaning of words, phrases, clauses and sentences are clarified. And so on; for example, British expressions have been changed to their more universal equivalents. All in all, the result was a very good translation.

I then tried to interest the publishers of the first translation in bringing out a better one, mine. When on the 50th anniversary of the author's death, the publishers re-issued the same translation together with DVD's of Visconti's movie. I wrote them to say they had missed an opportunity to produce a better anniversary package. They asked for my manuscript. That was 2 years ago. I haven't heard anything since. Nor did I hear anything from the Italian Publisher. I may publish it myself.

The movie is a disappointment in English; the Italian version is more pleasing, primarily because of the Sicilian accents and words. And it's longer because of the extended Ball scene. However visually compelling Visconti's film, it stops short of being, The Leopard. For one thing, it ends after the ball. Despite the critics, this ending does not intimate the Prince's death (he is obsessed with death from the beginning). And the most compelling chapter, Death of A Prince, is not there.

There's much more to be said, read and written about this book and movie, I'm sure. But congratulations to the Accidental Blogger for re-introducing The Leopard.

Francesco and others, that's fascinating. To my ear, the AC translation has a dowager beauty, complex and rich and tottering, dated but slyly devastating for that. If a translation has a personality, and is vivid, then I tend not to fuss wanting more. Wrong or right, I'm happy. But I'd love to see what you did in that way with The Leopard. I wish you great good luck in finding the path for your translation. Books that are self-published as ebooks can succeed, and find hard copy publishers, especially if the marketing is very clever. Keep us in the picture, okay?

I'm not completely convinced about whether the concatenation of subordinate clauses is a disservice to the original. I find it charming, but then I have always been a fan of run-on sentences.
I suspect that the reason for there being no takers for the new translation is that AC's translation is more than adequate to convey the flow of the language, deficient as it might be in its interpretation of Sicilian idiom.
I'm currently reading a 1991 edition of the AC translation and am quite dissatisfied with the 2007 updated version of the translation myself. It rings too modern to my ears,probably due to modernizing edits.

Thanks for your comment. Would you perhaps like to share a sample of your own translation with our readers? For example, I have quoted two excerpts from the book in my post - Don Fabrizio's response to Chevalley and the church organist's complaint about the vote in Donnafugata. Could you email me your versions of the same passages?
I will be happy to put them up on the blog.

All best with the efforts to publish your version of The Leopard. In these days of e-publishing, why not and who knows where that will lead to?

There is a saying in Italian, "traduttore traditore", meaning translator traitor, he who betrays the original. Which is why I can't really argue about preferences for one translation or another; I can only point to poor rendition of meaning and mistranslations. Many great authors have suffered this fate, which is why translations of their works abound. Fortunately, AC does not suffer much on this account. To make some things understandable, my translation has added some footnotes to clarify obscure references in the text. My work was finished August 2006 and contact with the publisher made near the end of 2007. As for style in the original, critics of his day faulted the author for writing too traditional a story in too traditional a manner. Finally, I wish I could remember the title of the RAI movie about the author on the eve of his death and his relationship with his nephew, his adopted son. The movie also goes into the novel. Given that 4 years have gone by, it's time for me to review my own work; I've already found typos, and probably there are more than typos to be found.

The Leopard with high expectations which were thoroughly satisfied. The novel, apparently based on the life of di Lampedusa's great-grandfather, is the story of a proud, sensual, Sicilian aristocrat at the time of Italy's Risorgimento(1860), and his reaction to the changes he sees in his society: mainly the inevitable, indeed necessary, but still in some ways regrettable displacement of the aristocracy from their traditional position.

This is really rich material...a very well done review.Not only is there information from and about the book but also, it carries a critique of the genre along with crucial insights including the one on the translation of the novel. This review evokes more than casual interest in the book. I 'll look for it.

Regarding the question of translation, The Leopard is not a completely happy translation of Il Gattopardo as Lambadusa's title refers to an animal, the "cat leopard," which is now extinct, befitting the main character of the wonderful novel who promises to be the last in a long family line.